Publications

Another city is possible! Alternatives to the city as a commodity: Participatory Budgeting. Dossier nº1

In cities and neighbourhoods throughout the world, citizens
and communities are resisting, organizing themselves and generating
alternatives to challenge an imposed urbanization model based solely on market
rules that systematically generates social and economic exclusion. These
alternatives mitigate the negative impacts of a crisis, sometimes referred to
as 3F (Food, Fuel and Finance). Over the next years six dossiers will be published as part
of the collection: Another city is possible!

Alternatives to the city as a commodity.

The dossiers will introduce some of these alternatives and
their actors and also include written and visual resources for those who want
to know more and become involved. These are far from exhaustive accounts of the
alternative ways that people are building other possible and liveable cities,
realising Utopian ideals envisioned through the World Social Forum. However,
each one of the alternatives listed below corresponds, in our opinion, to the
most promising ways to reclaim the Right to the City.

Forming part of the
Another city is possible series written in anticipation of the Habitat
III conference in Quito in 2016, this collection of 23 case files on
participatory budgeting (PB) challenges dominant conceptions of urban futures
for cities in a way that goes beyond anecdotal experimentations.

The book is structured in four sub-dossiers, which provide
readers with relevant background information on the following topics:

· key
challenges;

· a wide range
of practical case study narratives of PB experiences around the world;

· the
contribution of PB to broader issues such as the democratization of local-level
governance; and

· an excellent
list of recommended readings, websites and films in Portuguese, Spanish, French
and English.

PB emerged in 1989 in Brazil. Since then it has steadily
expanded in villages, cities, and regions and diversified its theoretical and
practical approaches. Focusing on PB experiences that have the capacity to
demonstrate that another city is possible, the authors highlight that there
is no blueprint solution; rather, a variety of social, political and financial
dimensions have to be considered to unleash the potential of this mechanism.
Analytically, they distinguish PB according to the type of territory, theme and
actor, creating a table of PB profiles that includes their underlying
rationales.

Case studies include Cascais in Portugal, where PB triggered
a diverse urban agriculture movement. There, people and community organizations
took the importance of environmental issues seriously and developed and
implemented creative solutions such as a teaching farm, community kitchen and
knowledge workshop. The case of Belo Horizonte is widely known and discussed
for producing low-income housing and infrastructure works and supporting
self-management in Brazilian favelas. It is considered one of the
longest-running and most original PB cases. The mining town of Ilo in Peru,
which has 63,000 inhabitants, stands out as a city that allocates 100 per cent
of its capital budget in a participatory way. Over its 15 years of experience,
which led to a highly institutionalized process, it has seen a large number of
people discussing and voting on an exceptionally large budget, which comes from
mining royalties from the central government.

In sum, the series highlights in a critical yet encouraging
way how PB can serve as a mechanism that can generate alternatives to cities as
commodities. It does so by providing possibilities for new forms of
community-led organizations to develop and be empowered. This aids in the
(re)building of trust among citizens and the public sector, but also requires a
lot of time and energy to be established, up-scaled and deeply
institutionalized.